After a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) , another high-powered conference has started in Tashkent in Uzbekistan from Thursday. Indian External Affairs S. Jaishankar, Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, the US Special Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad are among 250 delegates from the 40 countries attending an international connectivity summit. The conclave is themed as Central and South Asia: Regional Connectivity, Challenges and Opportunities. Special emphasis will be placed on the future of Afghanistan.
Ahead of the conference, Indian Ambassador to Uzbekistan Manish Prabhat stressed on the importance of the conference when he told the ANI that the Central Asian country is completely landlocked, and therefore wants an outlet to the sea to support its international trade. India, on its part, wants to open trade routes and create new routes, as well as increase trade through air corridors. All these aspects will be discussed in the conference. Jaishankar will articulate India's proposal at the conference.
"India has done a lot to develop the Chabahar port in Iran especially. We want this connectivity to be done through the port of Chabahar, so that our trade will increase to countries of Central Asia. At present trade is happening from Afghanistan. Chabahar port can play an important role for businesses in central Asian countries too," Ambassador Prabhat observed.
As of now, Integration of the International North South Transport Corridor (INSTC) and the Chabahar route has been India's prime focus. In March, India and Iran celebrated 'Chabahar Day', where Jaishankar proposed the integration of the Chabahar Port with the INSTC.
"I am hopeful that during the INSTC Coordination Council meeting, member-states would agree to the expansion of the INSTC route to include the Chabahar Port and also agree on expanding the membership of this project," Jaishankar had said.
INSTC project
The INSTC project came into being in 2002, when the transport ministers of Russia, Iran, and India signed an agreement to establish a 7200-kilometer multimodal ship, rail and road-based transport network. Starting from Mumbai, it would head to Moscow via Iran and the Caspian Sea.
Currently, the INSTC is set to spread its radials on a much bigger area. Essentially the new INSTC is a combination of two corridors. One starts as originally conceived, from Mumbai and heads to Bandar Abbas, a famous Iranian port in the Gulf. From here it takes the overland route to Bandar Anzali, which is on the Caspian Sea coast. Containers are off-loaded here and shipped through the Caspian to its Russian shore at Astrakhan, which becomes the base of further transportation in Eurasia. Over time other countries have been networked in this rapidly mutating corridor including Azerbaijan and Armenia.
The second corridor or the Chabahar route begins at Mumbai, but Gujarat's Mundra port is more prominently in play. From here it heads to Chabahar, Iran's only Indian Ocean port, which has vast potential. From Chabahar, in which India is pitching major investment, the route heads towards Afghanistan via Iran's Sistan Baluchistan province along a recently India-built road. Over time, a railway is also envisaged, which will link Chabahar with the Hajigak iron ore mines in Afghanistan, where India has made a major investment
Planners of the INSTC now want to link the two routes into a huge undertaking that will allow landlocked regions of Eurasia, not only to access the rapidly congesting Bandar Abbas, but also the rapidly expanding Chabahar route.
The Tashkent conference has three common themes of discussion - Economy, Security, Culture.
It is aimed at rebooting historical ties between Central and South Asia and in the centre is Afghanistan which is being ravaged by the Taliban and its allies.
"As you know, Afghanistan as a crossroad of transit in the region, plays a valuable role in regional connectivity, especially in Central Asia and South Asia," said Latif Mahmoud, the spokesperson of the Afghan president Ghani.
Expanding links between South and Central Asian markets is a decades-old issue. Tashkent, which is keen to be seen as a regional player, wants to use the conference as a launchpad for Central Asia's deeper engagement with South Asia. A major objective of the summit is the development of solid foundations for closer interaction between Central and South Asian regions, identifying specific projects of a strategic nature.
The security situation in Afghanistan has been deteriorating since the US and its NATO allies withdrew their troops after more than 20 years of commitment. The Afghan government and Taliban negotiators have been meeting in Qatar's capital Doha to discuss the Intra-Afghan Peace Talks, but the results look uncertain.
(With inputs from IANS)
